The short answer to that question is that it looks very much like the SNP are the ones who are serious about successfully reaching a genuine compromise - John Swinney and Linda Fabiani both strike me as natural conciliators who members of other parties find it difficult to dislike. By contrast, I can't even imagine what sort of message the Lib Dems' appointment of Tavish "Two Hoots" Scott, and the Tories' appointment of Adam "IT'S THE LAW!!!!!" Tomkins, is supposed to be sending out. Both men are noted for their irrational tribal loathing of the Scottish national movement. In the case of Tomkins, you can kind of see the logic for having him there (even though he isn't, to the best of my knowledge, a member of the Conservative party), because he was the architect of the party's blueprint for greater devolution, and they'd want someone with a mastery of the details in on the discussions - although the snag is that he has a self-image of being an infallible God-like figure, so how flexible he'll be when he discovers that others think his blueprint can be (gasp!) improved upon is open to question.
Scott is a different matter. His own personal loathing of the SNP famously extended to refusing even to enter into the most preliminary of discussions on a possible coalition after the 2007 election, even though his party had happily compromised for eight years to sit in coalition with the Labour party. If these negotiations are to have a chance of succeeding, they will surely require the (nominally) federalist Lib Dems to act as the bridge between the Devo Max-supporting SNP and Greens on the one hand and the Devo Minor-supporting Tories and Labour on the other hand. Is Scott the man to achieve that, or will he turn his back on his own party's policies so that he can do what every instinct in his body will be telling him to do, ie. side with Labour and the Tories?
* * *
I went to the Ryder Cup yesterday. I bought the ticket last year when the random draw was held, and suffice to say that one day was all I was ever going to be able to afford. With such ridiculous prices, it's unsurprising that there wasn't the same kind of democratic crowd we saw at the Commonwealth Games - it was mostly dyed-in-the-wool golf aficionados, plus a lot of corporate-looking people.
From my own point of view, the timing wasn't ideal, because for obvious reasons I'm still feeling a bit shell-shocked. So I spent most of the day just trying very hard to concentrate on what I was actually looking at! It was fun, though - there aren't many sporting events where you can turn around at any moment and find someone like Justin Rose sitting right next to you in a buggy. The crowd was infectiously raucous, and of course Gleneagles itself is absolutely stunning.
The place was drenched in tartan, and kilts, and slogans about Scotland being "a land of #brilliantmoments". I couldn't help wondering if international visitors thought this display of Scottishness-not-Britishness was a bit peculiar from a country that has just decided (albeit perhaps only for the time being, and only by a relatively narrow margin) not to be a proper country, and that was even grotesquely "congratulated" by the US President for voting not to join the global family of nations. I'm sure the contradiction won't seem so strange once a few months have elapsed - after all, we've lived with it all of our lives. But right at this moment it does feel very, very odd. When the train pulled in to Gleneagles station, we were welcomed by a piper - surely in the light of the No vote, it should have been Bernard Cribbins singing Right Said Fred?
This is one side of their decision that I think a lot of No voters are in denial about. How many times during the campaign did we hear Scott Hastings wax lyrical about how the union gave him the best of both worlds, by allowing him to proudly play for Scotland? The problem is that the union didn't do that - it's just a freakish accident of history that allows Scotland to play as a country in its own right in rugby and in a handful of other sports (including golf). In most sports, last week's vote has directly robbed athletes of their chance to play for Scotland, and has subsumed the country into a uniform Great Britain identity in which the waving of saltires Shall Not Be Tolerated. Perhaps the most poignant moment of the last week-and-a-bit was Andy Murray's declaration of support for the Yes campaign being followed just a couple of days later with him issuing a statement about how he was looking forward to playing for Great Britain for "the rest of my career". Now, I'm sure he genuinely is looking forward to it - he seems entirely comfortable with either identity. But the point is that, even if he wasn't so comfortable, he wouldn't actually have a choice.
* * *
If you think the conspiracy theories about the referendum being rigged are a bit silly, you should have heard the woman that was sitting opposite from me on the train back to Glasgow last night...
"I always thought that G-Mac was gay and that the girlfriend was just for show. But then they got married and had a baby. They could still just be pretending, though."
* * *
Introducing the Scot Goes Pop Subsample Aggregator
OK, I probably won't be updating this one quite as religiously as I did the referendum Poll of Polls, but it might be interesting to have a look at now and again. In the absence of regular full-scale Scottish polls of Westminster voting intentions, it's possible to get a very rough idea of trends by adding up the Scottish subsample figures from the daily GB-wide YouGov polls. It's not an ideal method by any means, because YouGov weight their GB-wide figures by Westminster party ID, meaning they usually produce a much worse result for the SNP than other pollsters. But as it happens, in the four polls that have so far taken place entirely after the referendum, the SNP have been doing extraordinarily well...
Westminster voting intention (average of four YouGov subsamples) :
SNP 40.3%
Labour 29.5%
Conservatives 17.3%
Liberal Democrats 5.5%
Greens 4.0%
UKIP 2.8%
We really can't rely on this lasting - it's only happening because the SNP have been in the spotlight so much recently. Where we end up will depend on how resilient the vote proves when publicity from the London media melts away in the heat of a general election campaign, and especially after the broadcast of another round of rigged leaders' debates that completely exclude the SNP and Plaid Cymru.
The main hope will be that the debates don't capture people's imaginations in quite the same way this time. Even if Clegg performs reasonably well, he's so distrusted now that he won't get much credit for it. And I think we can safely assume there isn't going to be any "Mili-gasm".
* * *
I gather that Alex Massie wrote a snide article the other day about how Yes supporters were going through the classic "stages of grief". Well, he's half-right, but what we're actually grieving for is the loss of those halcyon days when we thought Massie was an "undecided voter" (ahem), and when it didn't even occur to us for a moment that he was misleading people by blagging his way on to a BBC referendum debate as a "Don't Know". And then it turned out just days before the referendum that he'd been some kind of Tory unionist all along. The shock! The devastation! How could we not have noticed?
* * *
If you'd like to help Scot Goes Pop continue until the May 2015 general election, a second fundraiser is now underway.
Showing posts with label golf. Show all posts
Showing posts with label golf. Show all posts
Saturday, September 27, 2014
Friday, July 19, 2013
Go get 'em, Tiger! You da man! Get in the HOOOOOLE!
Yup, you've guessed it. Not content with my already impressive credentials as a woman-hater (well, if you believe Edinburgh Eye and Better Nation supremo James Mackenzie), I decided to burnish them still further yesterday by popping along to Muirfield for the first round of the Open. I've never experienced anything like that before (heat in Scotland, I mean) so it was all very exciting.
Not having previously been to a golf tournament, my main concern was that I would unwittingly do something stupid or wrong and find myself being bawled out in Monty-style by a player, caddie or marshal. That fear wasn't entirely unfounded, because I repeatedly thought I was ambling along, minding my own business, only to discover I was actually in the middle of a fairway or on the edge of a green. Most of the time it was impossible to tell who was the unfortunate target of the shrieks of indignation, although on the one occasion that I thought it might well be me, it was (to my eternal shame) a Scottish player I was potentially distracting. Fortunately, Martin Laird recovered his composure sufficiently to put together a below-par round, and I see that he has done well again today. It's probably too much to hope that he's a potential winner, but it's good to know that a Scot can at least still be competitive in majors. Reading his back-story, though, it's slightly sad to find that he's another example of a Scottish sportsman like Andy Murray who had to go abroad at a young age to achieve great things.
There's obviously some logic to the draconian rules that the marshals enforce, but it does lead to an unfortunate fixed setting of "aggressive official". Even the chap who "welcomed" us to the course started by screaming "WE WANT YOU TO ENJOY YOURSELVES TODAY", but thankfully refrained from adding "OR YOU WILL BE EXECUTED". I felt a bit sorry for a Spanish guy with very poor English, who misunderstood an instruction to put his camera away, and found himself being charged up to in nightclub bouncer style by a marshal, who menacingly whispered in his ear : "I appreciate it may be silent, but if you use that everyone else will follow your example, so it needs to go away now". Given the circumstances, I think "do you speak English?" might possibly have borne more fruit than the War and Peace edition of "why cameras are banned".
The only mention I heard of the male-only issue was on the train, when a young Scottish guy asked an Irish woman what she thought of it. "That's golf," she replied. Emboldened, the man complained that "nobody ever says anything about the all-women clubs". Well, yes, but that's probably because the all-women clubs were predominantly founded to compensate for the existence of all-male clubs. If that hadn't been the case, they certainly would be legitimate targets for criticism, just as the bizarre Women's Prize for Fiction is.
As a final thought, the woman added : "I watch women at my own club, most of them don't even know the etiquette, it's an embarrassment". Spurious anecdotal justifications for discriminating against an entire gender - don't you just love them? Typical bloody redhead.
Not having previously been to a golf tournament, my main concern was that I would unwittingly do something stupid or wrong and find myself being bawled out in Monty-style by a player, caddie or marshal. That fear wasn't entirely unfounded, because I repeatedly thought I was ambling along, minding my own business, only to discover I was actually in the middle of a fairway or on the edge of a green. Most of the time it was impossible to tell who was the unfortunate target of the shrieks of indignation, although on the one occasion that I thought it might well be me, it was (to my eternal shame) a Scottish player I was potentially distracting. Fortunately, Martin Laird recovered his composure sufficiently to put together a below-par round, and I see that he has done well again today. It's probably too much to hope that he's a potential winner, but it's good to know that a Scot can at least still be competitive in majors. Reading his back-story, though, it's slightly sad to find that he's another example of a Scottish sportsman like Andy Murray who had to go abroad at a young age to achieve great things.
There's obviously some logic to the draconian rules that the marshals enforce, but it does lead to an unfortunate fixed setting of "aggressive official". Even the chap who "welcomed" us to the course started by screaming "WE WANT YOU TO ENJOY YOURSELVES TODAY", but thankfully refrained from adding "OR YOU WILL BE EXECUTED". I felt a bit sorry for a Spanish guy with very poor English, who misunderstood an instruction to put his camera away, and found himself being charged up to in nightclub bouncer style by a marshal, who menacingly whispered in his ear : "I appreciate it may be silent, but if you use that everyone else will follow your example, so it needs to go away now". Given the circumstances, I think "do you speak English?" might possibly have borne more fruit than the War and Peace edition of "why cameras are banned".
The only mention I heard of the male-only issue was on the train, when a young Scottish guy asked an Irish woman what she thought of it. "That's golf," she replied. Emboldened, the man complained that "nobody ever says anything about the all-women clubs". Well, yes, but that's probably because the all-women clubs were predominantly founded to compensate for the existence of all-male clubs. If that hadn't been the case, they certainly would be legitimate targets for criticism, just as the bizarre Women's Prize for Fiction is.
As a final thought, the woman added : "I watch women at my own club, most of them don't even know the etiquette, it's an embarrassment". Spurious anecdotal justifications for discriminating against an entire gender - don't you just love them? Typical bloody redhead.
Monday, October 1, 2012
European Ryder Cup team puts Team GB to shame : this is how a multi-national team should conduct itself
What a joy the last three days have been. Unfortunately I only managed to catch the occasional bit of Andy Murray's charge towards the US Open title when I was in Portugal, and as much as I enjoyed the Olympics, the spectacle was somewhat tarnished by the politicised zealotry over flags and anthems surrounding Team GB. In contrast, the European Ryder Cup team has shown exactly how a multi-national team should operate - in triumph all the players were proudly draped in their own national flags as well as the European flag. There was no Little Hitler from the equivalent of the BOA telling them they couldn't do that, because this was an inclusive team genuinely representing all of the nations of Europe, not a Greater England team on a political mission to snuff out every other rival identity. As a result, I had no difficulty losing myself completely in the contest as a European supporter. And how rewarding it was to do so, as one of the all-time greatest stories in sport unfolded.
It's the first time in ages that I've watched a golf event on Sky, and I must admit that I was very pleasantly surprised by the coverage. I would have imagined that Colin Montgomerie might be too intense for the commentary box, but in fact he took to it like a duck to water. The only thing that made me wince slightly was that he was a bit too partisan at times, something which stuck out all the more because the only American commentator (Butch Harmon) seemed to be genuinely thrilled for the Europeans whenever they produced a good shot.
Another thing that I didn't entirely agree with the commentators about was their fulsome praise for the spectators. The idiots may have been in the proverbial small minority, but I still sincerely hope that minority will be a hundred times smaller at Gleneagles in two years' time. Shouts of "hit it in the water!" or "hit it in the trees!" were clearly audible time and time again when the Europeans played. And the European spectators can't be entirely absolved of blame either - there was a small amount of moronic booing when Alex Salmond's name was announced during the closing ceremony. Given the composition of the European contingent of supporters, it seems fairly likely that the boo-boys were for the most part English Daily Mail-reading types who were trying to make some sort of tedious point about "keeping their beloved country together". Newsflash, chaps : the team you've been supporting is called "Europe", and Alex Salmond is considerably keener on being part of Europe than you are. It's OK, and probably even quite healthy, to occasionally take your own politicians down a peg or two by booing them at a big event on home soil, but to boo another country's First Minister on foreign soil just makes you look boorish and ill-mannered. Fortunately, Mr Salmond quickly silenced the idiots, and earned warm applause during a short but well-judged speech which hit all the right buttons.
One thing that always slightly confuses me about Ryder Cups is the ambivalence among the players towards the distinction between actually winning the match outright, and retaining the trophy by means of drawing the match. The legend of Jack Nicklaus' sportsmanship in 1969 suggests that the distinction does matter, and yet tonight it was as if nobody really cared. I may be wrong, but Tiger Woods' casual concession of a putt on the 18th that was only slightly shorter than the one he had just missed looked more like an expression of disgust and impatience than of sportsmanship.
Last but not least, congratulations to Paul Lawrie. When he won his point I had a horrible feeling it was going to be in vain, just as it had been as he racked up the points in his only previous Ryder Cup appearance in 1999. Instead it turned into the perfect day. Let's hope that at least one Scot (Martin Laird?) can follow in Lawrie's footsteps, and somehow squeeze into the team for Gleneagles.
It's the first time in ages that I've watched a golf event on Sky, and I must admit that I was very pleasantly surprised by the coverage. I would have imagined that Colin Montgomerie might be too intense for the commentary box, but in fact he took to it like a duck to water. The only thing that made me wince slightly was that he was a bit too partisan at times, something which stuck out all the more because the only American commentator (Butch Harmon) seemed to be genuinely thrilled for the Europeans whenever they produced a good shot.
Another thing that I didn't entirely agree with the commentators about was their fulsome praise for the spectators. The idiots may have been in the proverbial small minority, but I still sincerely hope that minority will be a hundred times smaller at Gleneagles in two years' time. Shouts of "hit it in the water!" or "hit it in the trees!" were clearly audible time and time again when the Europeans played. And the European spectators can't be entirely absolved of blame either - there was a small amount of moronic booing when Alex Salmond's name was announced during the closing ceremony. Given the composition of the European contingent of supporters, it seems fairly likely that the boo-boys were for the most part English Daily Mail-reading types who were trying to make some sort of tedious point about "keeping their beloved country together". Newsflash, chaps : the team you've been supporting is called "Europe", and Alex Salmond is considerably keener on being part of Europe than you are. It's OK, and probably even quite healthy, to occasionally take your own politicians down a peg or two by booing them at a big event on home soil, but to boo another country's First Minister on foreign soil just makes you look boorish and ill-mannered. Fortunately, Mr Salmond quickly silenced the idiots, and earned warm applause during a short but well-judged speech which hit all the right buttons.
One thing that always slightly confuses me about Ryder Cups is the ambivalence among the players towards the distinction between actually winning the match outright, and retaining the trophy by means of drawing the match. The legend of Jack Nicklaus' sportsmanship in 1969 suggests that the distinction does matter, and yet tonight it was as if nobody really cared. I may be wrong, but Tiger Woods' casual concession of a putt on the 18th that was only slightly shorter than the one he had just missed looked more like an expression of disgust and impatience than of sportsmanship.
Last but not least, congratulations to Paul Lawrie. When he won his point I had a horrible feeling it was going to be in vain, just as it had been as he racked up the points in his only previous Ryder Cup appearance in 1999. Instead it turned into the perfect day. Let's hope that at least one Scot (Martin Laird?) can follow in Lawrie's footsteps, and somehow squeeze into the team for Gleneagles.
Friday, October 1, 2010
Ryder Cup : In Europe, not run by Europe
I happened to catch Colin Montgomerie's speech at the (tremendously earnest, but that's golf) opening ceremony of the Ryder Cup, and I was bit startled when he began his address to the dignitaries with the words "First Minister, Mr President". Of course, it turned out he was referring to the President of the European Commission - Carwyn Jones must have been gutted, as he surely can't expect that many chances to enjoy the top billing in a pairing with Barack Obama.
It's perhaps not so surprising that José Manuel Barroso made time to put in an appearance at Celtic Manor, given that the Ryder Cup must be just about the only major sporting event in which Europe puts forward a unified team. What makes it even more of a phenomenon - truly an exception that proves the rule - is the fact that British people, and I suppose I'm particularly talking about English people here, never seem to have any difficulty whatever supporting the European team in full-blooded partisan fashion. Probably the main reason they feel able to do so is that golf's version of "Europe" is such a peculiarly British (and Irish) flavoured entity. Only once has the European home venue for the tournament been on the continent, and on only two occasions have there been continental captains. It's like a consoling biennial manifestation of a hubristic old fantasy that was never, ever going to be a runner in the arena where it really counted - "Britain leading in Europe".
It's perhaps not so surprising that José Manuel Barroso made time to put in an appearance at Celtic Manor, given that the Ryder Cup must be just about the only major sporting event in which Europe puts forward a unified team. What makes it even more of a phenomenon - truly an exception that proves the rule - is the fact that British people, and I suppose I'm particularly talking about English people here, never seem to have any difficulty whatever supporting the European team in full-blooded partisan fashion. Probably the main reason they feel able to do so is that golf's version of "Europe" is such a peculiarly British (and Irish) flavoured entity. Only once has the European home venue for the tournament been on the continent, and on only two occasions have there been continental captains. It's like a consoling biennial manifestation of a hubristic old fantasy that was never, ever going to be a runner in the arena where it really counted - "Britain leading in Europe".
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)